XXL Reveals 2020 Freshman Class

XXL Reveals 2020 Freshman Class

Once a year, the braintrust at the rap magazine XXL picks a group of up-and-coming rappers and puts them all together for a photoshoot and a series of videos. That group of rappers, known as the Freshman Class, is generally supposed to represent the magazine’s best idea of which new rappers seem destined for success. The magazine has a not-terrible success rate, and many of the most popular rappers currently working have appeared on that XXL Freshman class issue — some of them as recently as last year.

This afternoon, XXL unveiled this year’s cover and this year’s list of Freshmen. This time around, none of them are really obscure at all, and all of them have hits. One of them, Jack Harlow, is currently sitting at #3 on the Billboard Hot 100. So there aren’t a lot of shocking inclusions this time around. As always, some of these rappers are better than others, and some of the picks seem cannier than others. Here’s this year’s list of 12:

24kGoldn
Baby Keem
Calboy
Chika
Fivio Foreign
Jack Harlow
Lil Keed
Lil Tjay
Mulatto
NLE Choppa
Polo G
Rod Wave

XXL reports that Pop Smoke was going to be one of this year’s Freshmen before he was murdered in February.

more from News